Parenting & Family Quote by Henry Cole

Curiosity is the real badge of courage here, and Henry Cole makes that point with the kind of brisk moral clarity you expect from a nineteenth-century public servant who spent his life around institutions built on deference. He draws a clean line between kids who ask questions "because they were interested" and kids who stay silent to avoid "looking dumb". That contrast isn’t just about classroom behavior; it’s about the social economy of status. One group risks a small embarrassment to gain knowledge. The other hoards safety, treating ignorance as something to hide rather than something to fix.

The phrase "scared little rabbits" is doing heavy work. It’s a deliberately unflattering image: prey animals, twitchy and vigilant, defined by what might hurt them. Cole is calling out a kind of self-protective performance that masquerades as composure. The subtext is that fear of judgment produces compliance, and compliance is exactly what hierarchical systems reward. His admiration for question-askers is, implicitly, a critique of environments where children learn that appearing competent matters more than becoming competent.

Context matters: Cole lived in an era of expanding bureaucracy, standardized schooling, and public-facing "improvement" projects (the Victorian belief that society could be engineered into better habits). In that world, questions aren’t merely intellectual; they’re mildly insurgent. They interrupt the script. Cole’s intent is both practical and ethical: build citizens who can interrogate what they’re told, not just absorb it. The sting of the rabbit metaphor is a warning about what happens when education trains timidity instead of agency.